Everett Beekin

Richard Greenberg is a New York Jewish liberal playwright who has spent a great deal of time working at the South Coast Rep in WASP-ish, conservative Orange County near Los Angeles. His delightfully clever and heartfelt play EVERETT BEEKIN straddles both of these worlds and in doing so also spans half a century in the lives of an immigrant Jewish family as they assimilate into American society. The play begins in a tenement apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1947, where the Fox family—widowed Ma and her grown daughters Anna, Sophie and Miri—have gathered for Saturday night dinner. Their regular gossip-and-complaint session is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jimmy, Miri's goyisheh boyfriend, who wants her to come to California, where he is starting a business with a partner named Everett Beekin VI—scion of a long line of talented men mysteriously prone to sudden disappearance. In Act Two, the action moves forward and westward to the late 1990s in southern California, where Jimmy's dream of a new and prosperous life is being lived out by Anna's children Celia and Nell, and Nell's daughter Laurel, who happens to be marrying... Everett Beekin VIII, the grandson of Jimmy's partner and an endearing lost soul with pre-wedding jitters. The two time periods and settings add up to make an unorthodox play that is funny, touching and surprising. EVERETT BEEKIN opens revealing windows on the American Dream as well as the way mothers hand down their traditions (and their foibles) to their daughters. This show also marked the LCT debuts of three remarkable women--starting with director Evan Yionoulis, who won an Obie for Three Days of Rain. Her productions at theaters around the country have garnered great acclaim and, somehow in the midst of her busy schedule, she also finds time to chair the acting department at Yale and is a resident director at Yale Rep.